Ansible Constructed Inventory Plugin

 Posted on January 16, 2020  |  9 minutes  |  Pat Harrison

In this blog post we will look at how we can easily enrich an existing dynamic inventory using the constructed inventory plugin. But, before we do that, let’s take a step back. Ansible is simple automation tool that allows users to achieve common use cases such as configuration management, provisioning and complex multi-tier orchestration. Part of what makes Ansible so simple, is the fact that it is agentless. One doesn’t need to deploy agents or any heavyweight control software to get up and running with Ansible automation. [Read More]
ansible  tower 

Call Ansible Tower from ServiceNow

 Posted on August 5, 2019  |  6 minutes  |  Pat Harrison

In this post we will look at how we can call Ansible Tower from ServiceNow as part of a ServiceNow Catalog Request. For this example, I have a playbook in Ansible Tower that will manage the membership of a node within an F5 loadbalancer pool. The playbook expects the user to input the name of the node that should be managed and the state it should be in - either enabled or forced_offline. [Read More]
ansible  tower  servicenow 

Scaling Ansible Tower - Job slicing

 Posted on April 17, 2019  |  5 minutes  |  Pat Harrison

Ansible Tower is a centralised platform for running and controlling your Ansible automation. It provides a number of key features for running Ansible in the enterprise. Role-Based Access Control Inventory Management Credential Management Auditing & Logging Clustering & Scale-Out Job slicing is a new scale-out feature that was introduced in Ansible Tower 3.4 which allows us to run jobs that are distributed across our Ansible Tower cluster. Before we look at job slicing let’s quickly look at clustering and job distribution within a cluster. [Read More]
ansible  tower 

RHV Disaster Recovery - Part II

 Posted on January 16, 2019  |  6 minutes  |  Pat Harrison

In part one of this blog we looked at the different Disaster Recovery Solutions for RHV. In this part, we will look at the Active/Passive implementation in more detail, including how to set it up and run it. You’ll also find a recorded demo of the failover process. Overview A quick recap on what was discussed in part one of this blog. The Active/Passive architecture allows us to fail Virtual Machines over to a Disaster Recovery site in the event of a failure in the Primary site. [Read More]
rhv  dr 

Infrastructure Migration Solution

 Posted on January 9, 2019  |  2 minutes  |  Pat Harrison

While VMware is undoubtedly a great virtualisation offering (I spent a number of users working with VMware tech) some customers are looking beyond traditional virtualisation. The growing adoption of containerisation is a great example of this and using RHV as a stepping stone to Container Native Virtualisation (CNV) is a good example use case. Other customers simply want to save costs and are looking at alternative virtualisation offerings. Whatever the reason for moving from VMware, we need a method for migrating workloads to RHV. [Read More]
rhv  ims 

RHV Disaster Recovery - Part I

 Posted on January 8, 2019  |  4 minutes  |  Pat Harrison

Since the release of Red Hat Virtualisation (RHV) 4.1 back in 2017 we have seen the inclusion of Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions. The aim of these solutions is to allow customers to deploy their RHV infrastructure to span multiple sites and allow failover of virtual machines in the event of a disaster. This post will take a look at these Disaster Recovery solutions. It is worth noting that these DR solutions are part of the core RHV product and are NOT part of a separate subscription offering. [Read More]
rhv  dr